When baritone Thomas Quasthoff canceled his Philadelphia Orchestra appearances this week - it promised to be a winter season highlight - the chain reaction of decisions left Wednesday's program overly long, underrehearsed, and lacking common sense.
Contact music critic David Patrick Stearns at 215-854-4907 or dstearns@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.
Filling the Quasthoff slot (and Mahler's Kindertotenlieder) was Vivaldi's Four Seasons, which was scheduled for next week, and still is, in a potentially interesting program juxtaposing these descriptive concertos with Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony. Vivaldi is better box office than Bruckner, but pairing the two wasn't mutually revealing, especially in performances that weren't particularly convincing.
The Vivaldi soloists were drawn from the orchestra, though only concertmaster David Kim and harpsichordist Davyd Booth seemed strongly engaged by the music, especially if you believe this airy repertoire sounds best when seeming effortless (not the case here).
Bruckner is usually a great occasion for the famous Philadelphia Orchestra sonority, and since the retirement of Wolfgang Sawallisch and death of Gunther Wand, the orchestra's music director Christoph Eschenbach is one of the few conductors around who knows the composer's idiom in his bones and connects strongly with the music's guileless existential anguish - heard in a desperate culmination in the Symphony No. 9.
At least that was the impression in my cherished radio recording of Eschenbach's 2002 performance with the NDR Symphony Orchestra. But almost none of the positive features in that performance were apparent Wednesday, which was just the latest instance of how much the Philadelphia Orchestra can be artistically imprisoned by its own personality.
The orchestra warmed Bruckner's layered textures, and some of the best moments in the first movement came from pungent brass effects. Elsewhere, not much was wrong, but little was right. Consistently lacking was the emotional fragility that can be so apparent in the questioning, haikulike incidental solos. The elemental tension in the counterpoint was barely there. The spacious Eschenbach tempos that ushered in the first-movement coda were mesmerizing in the Hamburg performance but seemed prosaic here.
The performance was that of a youth orchestra - accomplished, loud, superficially impressive and emotionally shallow. The spontaneity that Eschenbach cultivates with other orchestras but that reportedly annoys many Philadelphia players - an exhilarating quality that can make Bruckner's huge narratives seem as if they're made up on the spot - was absent.
Maybe the orchestra doesn't know what it's missing. I think it's called making music.
Contact music critic David Patrick Stearns at 215-854-4907 or dstearns@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.
com/davidpatrickstearns.
The program will be repeated at
8 p.m. Saturday at the Kimmel Center. Information: 215-893-1999 or www.philorch.org.
